Top 40 Laurence Gonzales Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Survival is the celebration of choosing life over death. We know we’re going to die. We all die. But survival is saying: perhaps not today. In that sense, survivors don’t defeat death, they come to terms with it.”

— Laurence Gonzales

2. “Count your blessings. Be grateful – you’re alive.”

— Laurence Gonzales

3. “As you run out of options and energy you must become resigned to your plight. Like it or not you must make a new mental map of where you are, not where you wish you were. To survive you must find yourself, then it won’t matter where you are.”

— Laurence Gonzales

4. “We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel.”

— Laurence Gonzales

5. “To survive you must surrender without giving in, that is to say, fully accept the reality in all its horror and never give up the will to survive. That allows you to quickly adapt to the situation and dedicate yourself to the present moment rather than wallow in denial.”

— Laurence Gonzales

6. “Success is a dangerous element in any endeavor. Embrace the struggle. Beware the achievement. For it steals your caution even as it leads you down the next unknown pathway.”

— Laurence Gonzales

7. “CHARLES PERROW is a sociologist known for studying industrial accidents, such as those that occur with nuclear power plants, airlines, and shipping. In Normal Accidents, he wrote that “We construct an expected world because we can’t handle the complexity of the present one, and then process the information that fits the expected world, and find reasons to exclude the information that might contradict it. Unexpected or unlikely interactions are ignored when we make our construction.”

— Laurence Gonzales

8. “We don’t understand the power of nature and the world because we don’t live with it. Our environment is designed to sustain us. We are the domestic pets of a human zoo called civilization.”

— Laurence Gonzales

9. “To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such.”

— Laurence Gonzales

10. “Rigid people are dangerous people.”

— Laurence Gonzales

11. “The summit is not the only place on the mountain.”

— Laurence Gonzales

12. “Plan the flight and fly the plan. But don’t fall in love with the plan. Be open to a changing world and let go of the plan when necessary so that you can make a new plan. Then, as the world and the plan both go through their book of changes, you will always be ready to do the next right thing.”

— Laurence Gonzales

13. “The true survivor isn’t someone with nothing to lose. He has something precious to lose. But at the same time, he’s willing to bet it all on himself. And it makes what he has that much richer. Days stolen are always sweeter than days given.”

— Laurence Gonzales

14. “The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.”

— Laurence Gonzales

15. “To survive you must find yourself then it won’t matter where you are.”

— Laurence Gonzales

16. “The sun beams are always there. The trick is in seeing them.”

— Laurence Gonzales

17. “The word ‘experienced’ often refers to someone who’s gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.”

— Laurence Gonzales

18. “Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little.”

— Laurence Gonzales

19. “To lose everything at such a glorious eternity is far sweeter than to win by plodding through a cautious, painless, featureless life.”

— Laurence Gonzales

20. “The maddening thing for someone with a Western scientific turn of mind is that it’s not what’s in your pack that separates the quick from the dead. It’s not even what’s in your mind. Corny as it sounds, it’s what’s in your heart.”

— Laurence Gonzales

21. “Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.”

— Laurence Gonzales

22. “To survive, you must develop secondary emotions that function in a strategic balance with reason.”

— Laurence Gonzales

23. “Joan Wernick said she took two lessons from the crash. “You’re going to die when you’re supposed to die.”

— Laurence Gonzales

24. “Whether a deity is actually listening or not, there is value in formally announcing your needs, desires, worries, sins, and goals in a focused, prayerful attitude. Only when you are aware can you take action.”

— Laurence Gonzales

25. “I’m a secular priest ordained by training, experience, and, most important, the willingness to accept the mantle of command. That willingness encompasses the realization that failure is easy, and such failure could kill me or, worse, kill someone else.”

— Laurence Gonzales

26. “Gravity is on duty all of the time.”

— Laurence Gonzales

27. “What does brace mean, anyway? Brace. Such an odd word. It comes from the Latin brachium, meaning arm. It means, as its heart, to embrace. It was a hug. A hug good-bye.”

— Laurence Gonzales

28. “In the immediate aftermath of the crash, a young police officer named Pat McCann, who happened to be training at the airport that day, saw a man who had managed to get the upper half of his body through his window before the lower half was incinerated inside the plane.”

— Laurence Gonzales

29. “He passed the dead in all their ranks, in all their spectral attitudes. Some lay supine, mouths open in attitudes of near ecstasy, one upon the next, embracing. Some had bowed their heads as if in deep meditation or prayer. Others had been ground to pulp against the concrete and conveyed no expression at all.”

— Laurence Gonzales

30. “He listened to a fire fighter tell of a woman he had found strapped into her seat, screaming. When he cut the seat belt, she fell apart. She was being held together by the seat belt. She died at his feet.”

— Laurence Gonzales

31. “Palmer had reached the field so fast that not all of the mortally wounded had died. “That’s one of the problems we had,” he said. “We were sitting there waiting for it, so they didn’t have that time to die.” For example, Palmer came upon a man who was lying on the runway. “He basically had both legs and both arms amputated. He asked me, ‘Am I gonna live?’ ” Palmer told him, “We’re gonna do what we can for you,” but he knew that he could not save the man.”

— Laurence Gonzales

32. “But what is the way forward? I know what it isn’t. It’s not, as we once believed, plenty to eat and a home with all the modern conveniences. It’s not a 2,000-mile-long wall to keep Mexicans out or more accurate weapons to kill them. It’s not a better low-fat meal or a faster computer speed. It’s not a deodorant, a car, a soft drink, a skin cream. The way forward is found on a path through the wilderness of the head and heart – reason and emotion. Thinking, knowing, understanding.”

— Laurence Gonzales

33. “He saw at least a dozen people still in their seats. Their clothes were torn or blown or burned from their bodies, “completely naked in front, missing limbs, missing faces, some breathing, some moaning, and others just deader than a door nail.”

— Laurence Gonzales

34. “Knowledge of the sort you need does not begin with information, it begins with experience and perception. But there is a dark and twisty road from experience and perception to correct action.”

— Laurence Gonzales

35. “As he walked along the runway, he came upon a United Airlines pilot. “He tried to sit up,” Martz said. “I saw a huge triangular hole in his forehead and I told him to just lie still and that help was on the way, but it was too late for him.”

— Laurence Gonzales

36. “Finally, I will never forget stopping near a lovely young girl still strapped to her seat, breathing slightly. Her blouse was white, her slacks were blue. At the end of the trousers were two snow-white ankle bones where her feet used to be. I had never seen the whiteness of bones that are freshly exposed like that.”

— Laurence Gonzales

37. “If you find yourself in enough trouble to be staring death in the face, you’ve gotten there by a well-worn path.”

— Laurence Gonzales

38. “The Rules of Life. The first rule we came up with was: Be here now. It’s a good survival rule. It means to pay attention and keep an up-to-date mental model. The second rule was: Everything takes eight times as long as it’s supposed to. That was the friction rule, which travelers in the wilderness will do well to heed.”

— Laurence Gonzales

39. “Only 10 to 20 percent of untrained people can stay calm and think in the midst of a survival emergency.”

— Laurence Gonzales

40. “Emotion is an instinctive response aimed at self-preservation.”

— Laurence Gonzales

41. “Empathy is an important quality for a survivor. Kiley’s desire to aid Meg may have helped her feel less like a victim. It may have given her at least some sense of personal power.”

— Laurence Gonzales